8.5 Environmental Justice Is Social Justice
Avery Temple and Kimberly Puttman
When we look at the problems of climate and environment, the sheer size of the issues can be disheartening. These issues are difficult to resolve because their causes and solutions are interdependent. For example, people in the US need oil to create gasoline for cars and fuel for industry. This voracious need encourages oil companies to produce oil efficiently. Industrial efficiency may incentivize some companies to use gas flaring in Nigeria. The causes of environmental degradation are linked in both obvious and subtle ways.
Solutions to environmental issues, particularly when they are effective, also reveal the power of our interdependence. Making a difference with this social problem requires both/and thinking, both individual agency and collective action. One optional video that explores how we can take action is We WILL Fix Climate Change [Streaming Video]. Let’s explore additional examples that look at collective action taken on regional, national, and international scales.
Environmental Justice in Oregon, Then and Now
The Bottle Bill
When I (Kim Puttman) was in college in the 1990s, I belonged to an organization known as OSPIRG, the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the group was instrumental in environmental activism in the state. They advocated for laws and policies that would reduce consumer pollution. Their legacy includes the Oregon Bottle Bill. To learn more about it, watch the 1.41-minute video How Did We Get Here: Oregon’s Bottle Bill [Streaming Video].
Then Oregon governor Tom McCall signed this bill, formally known as the Beverage Container Act of 1971, into law. With the support of other environmental groups and the legislature, the law became the first one in the nation to provide deposits on bottles and cans, encouraging people to return them rather than throw them away. The concept was both revolutionary and effective. In this post from the Oregon Historical Society, we see the consequences of this law, both then and now:
The Bottle Bill instantly reduced litter in Oregon. The share of beverage containers in roadside litter in the state declined from 40 percent before the law was passed to 10.8 percent in 1973 and 6 percent in 1979. The Bottle Bill also reinforces the practice of recycling. In the 2000s, about 84 percent of beverage containers were recycled, helping to make Oregon fourth in the nation for its rate of recycling (Henkles 2022).
In the case of action in one state, activists, beverage manufacturers and bottlers, grocery store owners and clerks, the legislature, and the governor all had to agree on what to do about the pollution problem. This new law had to be implemented and advertised through the media. For decades, grocery stores had to collect the initial refunds, process the bottles, and return the money to consumers. You may have even had a job that required you to handle these so